“My best friend since we were teenagers—who I hadn’t seen in years—came to visit a couple weeks ago. I had a week of activities planned: hiking, bike riding, and lots of hanging out. I knew he’d been drinking excessively and heard that he’d put on a few pounds.
I almost didn’t recognize him outside baggage claim. He had doubled in size. It was like a BOGO version of himself. His labored breathing from the walk through the terminal blocked out the songs I had queued up from our old band.
30 minutes later, we made it to the house, & he asked if it was cool if he took a nap. I get it. Travel can be exhausting, especially when it’s one of those horribly early flights that made sense when you booked it, but now seems like masochism.
He slept…for 26 hours…and the wails, yelps, screams, snores, & gasps from the guest bedroom sounded like the third circle of Dante’s Inferno. It was loud, disturbing, and nearly constant. We couldn’t sleep that night because we were convinced we were going to have a dead body on our hands in the morning.
Based on his size and apparent ill health, it was obvious we weren’t going to go pedaling around Browns Trail or hiking Pinnacle Peak, but I thought we could at least drive a couple hours north and walk among the satori-inspiring pines of Prescott.
I looked forward to reconnecting on the drive up there, but he slept the entire time, his snoring sounding like a mashup of Motorhead’s “Ace of Spades” and C&C Music Factory’s “Gonna Make You Sweat.” It made me sad. To see this longtime friend, more like a brother, that I shared so many experiences with, who possesses more talent and creativity than anyone I’ve ever known, to hear him dying in my passenger seat.
My wife brought him home a home sleep test that night. She looks at HST results for a living, and she said his test was among the TOP 3 WORST she’s ever seen. She basically gave him an HST results consultation right there in our living room.
He teared up. No doctor had talked to him about his sleep apnea or addressed the increased likelihood of stroke and heart attack. My wife explained the deleterious effects of OSA on overall health: appetite, cognition, energy levels, all that jazz.
When I dropped him off at the airport to go back home, I felt competing senses of loss and hope; I was worried I’d never see him again, that we’d never record our new album, that his son would grow up without a father. And optimism that he’d follow my wife’s direction to get his untreated OSA under control and fulfill his potential as a human being.
We talk a lot about the research, the industry, and reimbursement. Those are important, but the opportunity to save a life, to positively impact communities, and ensure that kids have fathers, that music gets made, that best friends enjoy old age together, that’s very real.
If you’re a dentist, a physician, or any type of sleep professional: from hygienists and PAs to office managers and assistants, your work is invaluable.
